There is an emerging belief that AI will make tech debt less relevant. Since it’s getting easier to write code, and easier to clean up code, wouldn’t it make sense that the typical company can handle a little more debt?
The opposite is true - AI has significantly increased the real cost of carrying tech debt. The key impact to notice is that generative AI dramatically widens the gap in velocity between ‘low-debt’ coding and ‘high-debt’ coding.
Companies with relatively young, high-quality codebases benefit the most from generative AI tools, while companies with gnarly, legacy codebases will struggle to adopt them. In other words, the penalty for having a ‘high-debt’ codebase is now larger than ever.